Bittersweet Fruit

Why did she feel she had to break through?

"It was a compulsion. I never even thought about it."

Surely it can't have been easy.

"It was the hardest thing I ever did."

* * *

Putting it on the page wasn't easy, either. You've got to write this, Brenner's agent told her after Carl died. "And I said, 'Oh no, I couldn't.' "

She flew off to Afghanistan and India, thinking she would do a book on Third World women. When she came back, she went to talk about it with Sarah Crichton, an editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, "and within about five minutes we had launched on our brothers, because she has a brother as mysterious to her as mine was to me."

Brenner's stories about Carl, Crichton recalls, were "funny and fierce and complicated and bewildering. Mine were -- similar. So I said, 'You've got to write about this. Those Third World women will still be out there.' "

Reporters can hide behind their questions, and at first Brenner tried to do that.

She told herself that she would talk to experts and interview other people with sibling issues. But this turned out not to be the point. She decided to dig deep into family history, which proved more helpful. But in the end, it wasn't the real point either.

The story was about one brother and one sister. And it hit so close to home that, even after it was written, she wasn't sure she could go through with publication.

"She just was unnerved," Crichton says. "And then she found her nerve."